It's a speculative commodity. But the real value of gold is its relative portability.
Precious metals have very limited utility value. If you're seeing resources move out of capital development and into specie accumulation, that's a sign the leadership doesn't have strong long term prospects for your economy.
That, or you're getting ready to take your nation's financial reserves and run
You'll take the salmon from my cold dead hands. Fucking love fish. Best food in existence.
Things are indeed fucked, but I'm hard pressed to get my hands on a sandwich for less than $5. And I can churn those fuckers out at home for half that.
I am perpetually annoyed at how expensive any kind of fresh fruit or vegetable is, though. Why can I buy a pound of chicken for less than a pound of blueberries? When did onions start running over $1/lb? Why is a bag of rice at the asian market twice the size and half the price of its equivalent in Kroger?
Still so much cheaper to dice up some potatoes and carrots, season to taste, throw them in a baking dish, and wait an hour than to go out of pocket $10-15 literally anywhere outside my home. And holy shit, breakfast tacos! Basically free in my kitchen. I can't find anyone willing to sell them for less than $4 outside of my home.
"People care too much about things" has long been the message of South Park
South Park routinely trips over itself as it sprints between "only an insufferable liberal would care about things" and "why are people so unfathomably cruel to each other?" Empathy isn't unknown to the writers. It just slips in and out of their memory whenever a punchline necessitates it.
ideals and aspirations for 15 year old edgy children and 50 year old edgy manchildren
The dirty truth of the human condition is how easy it can be for people to stop maturing (or outright regress) far earlier than we would like to acknowledge. And it certainly doesn't help when Americans are the most propagandized people on earth.
Canadian marketing professor
I'm hard pressed to assemble a more cursed string of words.
Just do shit that needs to be done then tax me whatever you had to spend?
We don't couple taxes with spending, so even that much is a farce. Whenever the US overspends (basically always) they simply cover the balance with new debt instruments. But then Congress needs to give the Treasury permission to issue more debt to go with the new spending. So they can write Treasury $1T in distributions but only give it the ability to cover $900B in spending, at which point Treasury has to decide what $100B goes unpaid.
And that brings us to the inevitably "Will Treasury pay your nan's Social Security check this month?!" headlines (that never resolve, because SS isn't part of the general fund, but what the fuck ever!)
Israel has outlawed publishing of videos that strike military targets
I don't doubt this is true, but I'd be curious to know how it is being enforced in the modern cell-phone age.
Also, Iran has announced that this is only the first wave of their retaliation
I guess we'll see how far Israel can stretch itself. If this blunts their incursion into Lebanon, that would be a positive sign. But I can't imagine they're not going to retaliate in turn, given the current pattern of behavior from Tel-Aviv.
In fairness, this is a callback to Dr. No - the original James Bond movie. Killing a British secret agent is always a good thing.
Petrodollar doesn't look as hot when people are migrating away from petroleum.
But also, the US Dollar has been defying socio-economic gravity for decades while the Euro and the Yen and the Ruble and the Peso all decline. "Worst since 1995" understates how overvalued the USD continues to be globally.
Also, not a good sign for anyone's economy when you're stockpiling gold.
Give it five days before Musk integrates a new "Bold text only for people with blue check marks" feature.
Thousands of missiles launched into Israel. No reported fatalities. Minimal injuries, primarily resulting from people injuring themselves as they rush into shelters.
I don't understand the strategy at all.
I don't think it's fair to say he was ungenuine or just chasing a pay day.
He did a good job of delivery early on. But once he started defending George Bush Jr - a man who stacked his career on phony religious pandering - the mask dropped like a rock. No one who goes this hard for an American Christian Conservative can possibly hold the views he claimed a decade earlier.
Maybe he changed over time. Or maybe Rupert Murdoch found the price for his soul. But the guy sold out hard all through the '00s.
Christianity was the most powerful force for regression and subjugation for the last 1500 years or so.
Turns out it wasn't Christianity, just aristocracy.
Russel Brand went the other way around and became a Christian to keep supporting western ideals.
He was always a mediocre entertainer. First he rejected Christianity as part of his dog-and-pony show. Now he's come around, because the original bit couldn't pull the same audience. But its always just been a performance. The only thing he cares about as the attention (and the money it generates).
Reminds me of Christopher Hitchens. A man who made a living on the talk show circuit by tweaking people's noses and saying "Are you mad? Are you mad, yet?"
All fun and games when the people getting tweaked were self-important holy rollers. But as soon as he saw a payday in pissing on anti-war protesters by calling them Islamists, the man was urinating like a fucking fire hose.
Dawkins is just a lower-rent Hitchens.
I think one thing Crusader Kings and Europa did better was building out these elaborate social relationships between aristocrats that prefigured the coalition of fiefdoms and confederacies of principalities that would eventually congeal into kingdoms, states, and empires.
One of the things a socialist revolution does is decapitate the monarchies that share all these ties back to the coalition states. French laborers and merchants guillotining the king and queen weren't just killing their own heads of state, but the immediate family of neighboring Austria. Literally the Holy Roman Emperor's kid sister. It wasn't just France toying with a new economic model, but the French government converting - practically overnight - from a close political ally to the seat of a nest of villainous assassins. It wasn't until the Napoleonic dynasty made inroads with European peers that tensions between France and the surrounding territories settled.
Similarly, the murder of the Tsar's family in Russia brought enormous shame on his immediate family in Britain. Not to mention the smattering of German, French, and Eastern European aristocrats who were on close terms with the Romanovs prior to the war. Governments to the east - in neighboring Turkey, Iran, China, India, Korea, and Japan - who either had no relation or retained an active beef with the European monarchies were significantly more sanguine at the shift in management.
Meanwhile, the Americans under FDR were relatively conciliatory and amicable to the Stalin government. Roosevelt's family formed bonds with Russian Revolutionaries of note. Much of the American press wasn't particularly fond of European aristocracy. And so relations thrived until the end of the war and the resurgence of Red Scare politics. And the US was at least somewhat amicable to a Cuban revolution against Batista, right up until Fidel began threatening the American aristocracy of Jewish/Italian mafia cartels and agricultural land baronies.
I don't think it is necessarily a given that Socialist and Capitalist economies can't intertwine. Certainly, the US and Russia managed it during detente (my extremely capitalist father made a number of trips to Russia while working for a US based conglomerate in order to build out their O&G infrastructure). And the US and China have been co-mingling for over 60 years, despite efforts to wedge them apart. But the movements that create socialist governments ex nihilo can cause a degree of family drama at the highest reaches of the state that can pollute diplomatic policy for generations to come.
My neighborhood in Houston is full of legitimately good chill people who would fit into a bodega in Brooklyn as easily as a tackle shop in Kentucky. Its frustrating because I grew up in a neighborhood where people were legit just a bunch of selfish reckless assholes and this ain't it. They're not invested in the culture war crap, they don't want a War with China or to crucify trans kids or whatever. But the power-mad fascists running the state government are just kinda railroading through insane bullshit because they can. Its enervating to just watch it all wash over us like a tidal wave of shit.
Imagining the plot of Hero but it's Joey Chestnuts winning a hotdog eating title so he can get close enough to swallow Trump like in a Kirby game.
It's Texas. California loves to Pantomime at decency then cower whenever someone calls to Woke.
Texas reveals in fascism and torments people for trying to be nice
If you're dead serious, the first step is to get rid of the consoles themselves. Uninstall the apps. Toss out the peripherals.
But I honestly have so little free time now that I can't imagine "giving up" video games in a realistic sense. Just get a job with a long commute that eats away all your time. Voila! No more gaming!